Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference
Workshop: Arabidopsis
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Two BBSRC programmes, Functional Genomics Technologies (FGT) and Investigating Gene Function (IGF), fund the Arabidopsis Transposon Insertion Service (ATIS) based at the John Innes Centre (http://www.jic.bbsrc.ac.uk/STAFF/michael-bevan/ATIS/index.htm). ATIS will generate 30,000 insertions of a gene-trap Ds (Sundaresan et al., 1995) and sequence the insertion sites of transposable elements (SINS) from publicly available collections: [1] The SLAT collection, which contains approximately 60,000 insertions of the dSpm transposon (Tissier et al., 1999); [2] The ACTIVATE collection, which contains 2000 insertions of an activation Ds element; [3] The FGT collection. The three populations provide a resource of loss-of-function mutations, gain-of-function mutations and gene expression patterns. These resources will aid the research community to exploit the 25,000 genes predicted from the sequenced genome. The sequence of insertion sites (SINS) can identify a potentially disrupted gene. SINS aid in the identification of gene-trap insertions that give rise to reporter gene expression, and activation Ds insertions that cause ectopic over-expression, by defining the exact insertion position and the orientation of the transposon relative to gene models made by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI). ATIS has developed a new database, the Arabidopsis Transposon Insertion database (ATIdb), (http://formaggio.cshl.org/~h-liu/attdb/index.html) integrating the transposon insertion sites with the current gene annotation models. Searches by chromosome, genetic/molecular marker, BAC/P1 location, protein class, and transposon class or by BLAST are available. The database contains 2000 sequences from the SLAT and ACTIVATE collections.